On lun., 2016-02-29 at 07:03 -0800, Peter Hurley wrote:

The reason why Eric's change is so effective for Eric's workload is
that it fixes the problem where NET_RX keeps getting new network packets
so it keeps looping, servicing more NET_RX softirq.

You have very little idea of what is happening in networking land.

Once hard irq for RX has triggered, we arm a NAPI (NET_RX softirq), and
no more irq will come unless the napi handler ran. Then when NAPI is
complete, we re-allow interrupt to be delivered when a new packet is
coming.

Yes, ksoftirqd runs under load, and this is _wanted_.

Sure, it might add a latency if some high prio task is wanting the same
cpu, but this is exactly the purpose of having multi tasking.